The intention is to introduce you to the people who have been carving their own path...with no care for what anybody thinks.

We try not to post things that are still for sale but sometimes post things that are not easily available. If you like what you hear, then find these people and tell them how great they are.

Better still, tell them and then seek out their new releases and buy them. We add links, when they are reliable and active, so that you can keep track if you so wish.

Always go straight to the artist or the label where possible. That way, the money goes straight to the people responsible for this art. These people rely on our support to keep going and make more quality releases!

Please feel free to leave comments as you go along...at least then we know you appreciate this stuff (or otherwise) and you're not just a bunch of freeloading file collectors.

If you made this music and we have pissed you off by posting any of this, please leave a comment in the post and the offending articles will be removed.

C60 and C90 set released on Sounds For Consciousness Rape in 1990. This documents live performances from the Divergences/Divisions festival in Bordeaux in October, 1989.

The first tape gives us Con-Dom and THU20. The latter are Frans de Waard, Peter Duimelinks and Roel Meelkop (aka Kapotte Muziek) with Guido Doesborg and Jac Van Bussel.

The second tape gives us Merzbow. In this incarnation, they are Masami Akita, Kiyoshi Mizutani and Reiko Azuma. As if that isn't enough, there is a collaboration between Masami Akita & GX Jupitter-Larsen before Gerald finishes off with a set as The Haters.

["Because of contractual obligations to Come Organisation, Consumer Electronics is not listed on the cover or labels of this record. On these tracks he collaborated with Gary Mundy, Matthew Bower and Alex Binnie, among others."]

Pandit Pran Nath was a Hindustani artist that was more influential than you may be realise. As an indication, this live performance also features Terry Riley on tabla and La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela on tambura.

This was excavated and released on Terry Riley's Sri Moonshine Music in 2006.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was a legendary singer of Qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufi tradition within Islam. His voice is instantly recognisable and he was one of a long line of ancestral Qawwali singers going back more than half of a millennium.

This was released on Real World Records in 1990. Accordingly, for the label and the times, his voice is framed by Western arrangements. This is only a primer for some of his live performances which will appear at some point in the future.

Blanco Niño was a band comprised of Mike Shiflet and Brent Gutzeit. As far as I'm aware, they only made this one CDR in a numbered edition of 150 copies, though it's not clear what label it's on (of any) or when it came out. For those who like their late 90's computer music with extra sizzle, this one will make your tinnitus all tingly.

Single-sided C60 self-released on Heid Tapes in 1997 that crawls at glacial pace.

Heid were Kristian Olsson, Peter Lindahl, Stefan Östlund and Tolufim (aka Daniel Eideholm). I know that Peter and Daniel recorded as L.E.A.K. (Lustige Elektro Akustische Klänge) but have never heard any of their work under that name. Kristian Olsson has since recorded under his own name, ran the Styggelse and Bolvärk labels and was a member of such outfits as Alfarmania, Blood Ov Thee Christ and Survival Unit .

Altered States were Uchihashi Kazuhisa (of Ground Zero amongst others) on guitar, Mitsuru Nasuno (of Ground Zero, Korekyojinn, Sanhedrin and played in Fushitsusha and Seijaku) on bass and Yasuhiro Yoshigaki (yep, Ground Zero and any number of Otomo Otomo Yoshihide projects) on drums.

This was their first release and came out on Zenbei in 1992. This is the initial glimpse of what may be the most appropriately named band ever.

This is a more conventionally structured release until you get to the final track: Suite "Circle". From that point my friend, all bets are off! Half an hour of absolutely epic (structured) chaos that will unhinge you and make you play it on rotation!

CD released on Zenbei in 1995. It's a 3 track affair with two sprawling 20+ minute juggernauts either side of a six minute work of art that comes across like a punch-drunk South Park theme song from another dimension!

An ugly beauty from the very early days of American Tapes, when Wolf Eyes was still years away and the compulsively prolific teenage John Olson was already taxing the motors of his Tascam, issuing a staggering number of small-run cassettes from suburban Ferndale (Tonight!) Michigan. This was pre-No Fun, pre-Hospital, pre-eBay, pre- that fleeting moment when noise was cool.

"Foes Like Gentle Talk" came out in a numbered edition of 30 copies on Am Tapes' Grave Prog imprint on 17 August 1999. It's a postal collaboration of fuzzy drone, backwards tape scramble, and woozy "free-improv"-lineage clarinet squawk perpetrated by Olson and his Southern Hemisphere equal, New Zealand's mighty (and, for reasons I cannot fathom, relatively unsung) Witcyst, whose own endless discography of defiantly homemade spliced-tape trash is as impressive as it is obscure (but you may as well start here). It seems likely that Witcyst's prodigious output influenced a young Olson from the other side of the planet, hence the evident empathy between the two on this tape. "Foes" contains no-fidelty, couldn't-be-arsed open-reel fuckery pressed right up against extended passages of delicate improvisation and single-minded static hush. It's a solid album of purposeful nonsense, as deep and evocative as it is gloriously unpolished.

As with all early Olson transmissions, "Foes" came out to zero fanfare and was probably mostly mailed out for free to friends and fanatics within the worldwide network of tape-traders and weirdos. Clearly, though, it deserves a wider audience. Soak it in, sports fans.

Around the time of this release Ruins were Yoshida Tatsuya on drums and vocals alongside Sasaki Hisashi on bass. I'm assuming that this is also the case here. They are joined by Uchihashi Kazuhisa (former member of such bands as Ground Zero and Altered States) on guitar to create some great imploding angular chaos. A jazzed up Truman's Water falling down a flight of stairs.

This is one of the early tapes released on Akifumi Nakajima's seminal G.R.O.S.S. label. It's a C42 from 1993.

Shida at this point is Toyohiro Okazaki (who was also a member of Dislocation, Minotaure and Sandmachine). This is a strange peek into the Japanese noise underground of the early '90s. At first this confused me ... it's a low level recording with a lot of chatter. It is at about 10 minutes of Side 1 when somebody coughs straight into the recording device that gives it away. To my Occidental perspective, this is a live recording of a moment that would have otherwise been lost had it not been for Aube's documentary dedication. Once you figure it out and move past, the talk just becomes part of the event.

Essentially this is a Dub Sonic release featuring collaborations with Shuichi Tamaru and Kazunao Nagata respectively. Judging by the title, you would expect walls of screaming guitars but that is far from what you get here.

The first track is Hado-Ho (aka Takehito Nakazato aka Dub Sonic) using a mixing desk to create long pitch-shifting drones. The second track with Shuichi Tamaru adds more layers of depth to create an (almost) intergalactic dark ambient feel akin to Sleep Research Facility. The third track with Kazunao Nagata creates a dystopian future that slips through your fingers.

This is a truly great piece of work that just evolves in front of you. NNN live with upright bass, keyboards, tenor sax and an off-kilter tribal rhythm section supplied by Dub Sonic Roots (Takehito Nakazato, Masaaki Kikuchi, Masahiko Okura and Tomohide Midori).

The final half hour long piece even riffs on Sun Ra's "Space Is The Place". There are places that get a really psychedelic groove going and turn into a jazz infused Sunburned Hand Of The Man mutation. This CD should be played on repeat!

This is probably one of Hiroshi Kumakiri and Tsuyoshi Nakamaru's more accessible works. Although all things are relative of course. Amongst the repetitive glitch, there are long passages of droning noise. The final track "Gagaku" is a shimmering warped masterpiece.

Imagine that you're sitting in a room that's relatively quiet, apart from two things: a fax machine that gets an incoming fax once in a while and a synthesizer in the corner that someone left on, then walked away. That's this CD. I cannot think of any explanation for it, or purpose for it to exist, and yet here it is. No chamber music and no factory. Released on Pearl Records in 1998. Good luck out there.